Guy Vernon is a novelette in verse portraying an unhappy marriage between North and South on the eve of the Civil War. Guy Vernon, a dashing plantation owner, takes as his wife a penniless young charmer named Florinda whom he meets at the Saratoga balls. Soon estranged, they are joined in their travels around New Orleans, Havana, and the abolitionist North by Vernon's freed black manservant, Saturn, a "mulatto" dandy who exerts a mysterious power over his former master, and by Florinda's previous suitor, Rob Lorne, a journalist and would-be poet. Back in print for the first time since 1878, Guy Vernon reemerges as a lost classic of American literature, one that both reflects and criticizes the social and literary conventions of its time.